P2P-DMA is making inroads to the linux kernel. Which means software can limit itself to orchestrating transfers between storage, GPUs, accelerators and network cards and avoid having the data touch system RAM or the CPUs.

Confining the CPU to the most noble processing, and flanking him with highly-specialized units directly exchanging... isn't it the mainframe all over again?

> Once storage is as-fast as memory, things change.

"Money can buy bandwidth. Latency requires bribing God."

For databases, there was a 2016 VLDB paper that suggested using 'write-behind logging' as an alternative to traditional 'write-ahead logging' that is "designed for a hybrid storage hierarchy with NVM and DRAM": http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol10/p337-arulraj.pdf

Lots of work, in both academia and industry. For example, check out Daniel Bittman's work at UCSC, and Tim Kraska's at MIT.

Two interesting things are happening here: memory becoming non volatile, and storage and network bandwidth catching up with memory bandwidth.

> Once storage is as-fast as memory

Bandwidth is only one aspect, SSD latency (even Optane) is still quite slow compared to RAM.

There's a lot of programs of late, designed to run in pure RAM. I imagine it would be similar? Except perhaps with different retention-over-restart characteristics.